Month: April 2012

Throughout school I encountered bullies and when you have no friends those bullies can have an even greater impact. Many incidents have happened to me with bullies at school and one incident that was particularly bad involving the P.E. teacher who was also the head of year.

As far as I was concerned school consisted of bullies, those that were neutral and, if you’re lucky, a friend. For most of primary school only the former two surrounded me. As I was going into year five of primary school I felt I had to change classes due to people bullying me. I was glad of this, though to be honest, I was still bullied in the other class as well.

I noticed I was the only person in class who used to put my head on the table and cry when something went really bad, like being bullied. The thing is I remember the table top most of all; it would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. In secondary school the tolerance I had to bullying was still crying but also telling them to go away, it made no difference though. I told the teachers many times and it made absolutely no difference, they would just keep bullying.

I think it was either in the fifth year or the sixth year that a bully from my previous class came up to me in the playground just before the bell rang to go into class either during break or lunch time. He came up to me and punched me square in the stomach and I was winded for a few seconds. I looked up at his face and there was the biggest Cheshire cat grin I’ve ever seen from one cheek to another. This was just one of the experiences I had of bullying in primary school. Much later I think I found out from television that he appeared on the television programme Road Wars and was arrested for apparently stealing alcohol. He was just as arrogant as he was in person all those years ago. This gives you an idea of how much I hated school. I could look at it saying that he was arrested so that was that, but at the same time, I was in a class with a soon-to-be criminal that used to bully me a lot at school. That brought back horrible memories.

In both primary school and secondary school two different bullies, including the one I mentioned above, seemed the same in one particular category, arrogance, and oh yes they had plenty of that. They both used to have wide grins on their faces. The one in secondary school was very good at P.E.; most bullies tend to be don’t they, but he mainly enjoyed psychological bullying. One such example is that he used to annoyingly brush his hand across my head in a patronising way, and that was most annoying. I didn’t know at the time that I had SPD but he took advantage of it, it’s as if he could read the difficulties people had and made the effort of taking advantage of it. There were also two other bullies who enjoyed coming up to people and making funny noises directly into their ears, that was very irritating especially when you have SPD. A bully also poured drink over my head once.

I was always afraid of being told off at school. School felt like a prison to me. I tried my best to get through every prison day to get to my haven, home. When I was in secondary school, there was an incident where the students started messing with a loose paving stone on the ground. I didn’t understand why they were doing it but I tried it to see what the fascination was thinking nothing of it if I was careful, and then out of nowhere someone else jumped on the other side, of course creating an imbalance of weight which in turn caused it to crack. One of my long standing bullies couldn’t wait to tell the P.E. teacher as P.E. was my next lesson and so he ran off at the speed of light, and I could swear he was relishing it. The world suddenly froze at that moment and my heart sank instantly. I have never forgotten it. I REALLY couldn’t go into P.E. at that time, but I had to, I don’t skip classes. I terrifyingly walked into the P.E. changing room, like a zombie, awaiting the worst but knew I couldn’t cope with it. My life seemed over at that point. My P.E. teacher was also the head of year. He must have been told because when I got changed into my P.E. kit and entered the gym hall he said he wanted to have a word with me. Firstly he got everyone doing an activity then he asked me to sit with him on a small set of table and two chairs in the same room with everyone else (My head was drumming and my heart sank even further, so far I thought that this is it, the end of the road. I thought that my life was over. I knew nothing good would come of this. I was in a living nightmare. I wanted to get out at the nearest opportunity, but that’s not me. I do the best I can in school, and try to come out the other side unscathed from the prison that kept me there for the first half of the day.). I, painfully slowly, made my way towards the chair. I wanted nothing more than to make a run for it to be free, as I knew exactly what was coming, my life was crashing down around me, and I couldn’t take it. I was amongst the other students in the gym hall but when it came to support, I was alone. He then asked me the painful question “did you step on the paving stone?” and “why did you do it?”, I immediately broke into tears and crossed my arms in front of my face on the table, in a defensive move, as I usually do when I break down in tears, which for me was quite frequent and cried, and cried, and cried. I couldn’t stop crying. The other boy that jumped on the other side of the paving stone came up to me to ask if I was alright. No, I wasn’t alright, I had the head of year interrogating me in front of everyone about something I had no control over. The teacher was even saying “What are you crying for?” over and over again, wasn’t it obvious, I thought, he quite obviously didn’t, though for the life of me I couldn’t understand why, and still can’t. I was in great pain, for many reasons. In fact I never stopped crying all the way home and for days after that, I never attended school during that time either, and I never ever went back. The pain it caused was so fierce I couldn’t face walking into that prison with the ‘head police officer’ being the cause of my pain. The welfare officer for the school knew how badly I was bullied as I was going to him for a while previously over it. It had hurt so badly that when the welfare officer came several times to try to get me back to school, I had this adamant feeling that I have never experienced in my life, and kept saying very strongly ”NO, I can’t”, I was never confident enough to come out as defiantly as that but I did and he knew I meant it. After the bullying, it was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. He knew I wasn’t someone who would cause problems and it was very difficult for me to say no to authority figures, he knew then this problem was very serious. That is the reason why I have not been in school since. I will explain the way I have been taught since then until recently.

For a long time now I have been contemplating creating a blog. I have never been able to get around to it. Now, at last, I’m trying to create one. I have a lot to say but am never sure where to put my words. I thought that writing a blog would be a good idea. There are many thoughts spinning around my head. Life can feel quite depressing. I will start to put a lot of my thoughts into this blog. I have never done anything like this before but I’m willing to give it a go and see where it ends up. I wrote a lot of things in the past and I thought now would be a good time to put it all together.